John Markoff has an overview piece in the New York Times today that synthesizes the crush of video-over-the-Internet developments he saw at CES this year. And his conclusion, even if not exactly stated this way, is that sooner or later, the traditional TV distributors will likely get gored by the rapid onset of Internet-based video.
The rapid emergence of the consumer electronics and computer companies as Internet video providers is certain to challenge the control of the cable, telephone and satellite companies, which seek to dominate the distribution of digital content to the home. Competition has intensified as more consumers have upgraded to digital televisions. Indeed, the easy availability of on-demand content over the Internet is certain to accelerate consumer expectations that they will have more control over digital video content, both to watch programs when they want as well as to move video programs to different types of displays in different rooms of the home.
From Google to Yahoo to Intel’s mysterious Viiv technology, this year’s CES marks the official beginning of the end of the traditional one-way, one-to-many modes of distributing video news, entertainment and sports. For sure this tectonic shift in television has been coming for a long time — at least six years — and will still take a long time to solidify.
Meanwhile, try as they might, cable operators, and now phone companies, can only mitigate, but not stop, this development with “two-tiered” Internet proposals. But maybe some kind of brake on this mind-boggling new world is needed. Markoff points that this technology shift changes television from a world of 50 or even 500 channels to a world of five million channels.
They are companies like Apple, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others, with all of them beginning to make available an ever-widening array of video content that looks more like a world of five million channels rather than 50 or even 500.
That’s too radical a shift in too short a period of time for a robust marketplace to take hold. In short, that’s kind of crazy and nothing in the history of the communications businesses — not even the Internet itself — prepares us for this kind of rapid sea-change. Summing up the view of Microsoft’s TV division, Markoff writes
Microsoft executives defend the way in which the telephone companies are deploying the company’s IPTV technology, saying that if consumers are exposed to the chaos and uneven quality of the open Internet, it is likely to undermine the development of the new services.
Still, traditional television is on the way out and this new world of unlimited choice, and unlimited content creation, is at hand. Television is dead; long live television.
Cynthia Brumfield at 10:01 AM|Comments(0)
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